At 10:48 AM 10/25/96 EDT, you wrote:
>Fellow Greeks,
>
>What I find the most difficult thing to do at present when reading
>Greek is parse accurately.
>
>Do any of the scholars or Greek teachers out there know of any
>good ways to learn to parse well. I can parse nouns and adjectives
>reasonably well and present tense verbs, but the other verb forms
>and especially PARTICIPLES, I have a lot of trouble with.
>
>Can anyone point me to books, sections of books or articles that
>deal with this matter well.
>Please, any help would be greatly appreciated.

I find that the appendixes at the back of Mounce's book, _Basics of Biblical
Greek_, are helpful. But one warning, I'm not sure if they would help as
much if you haven't gone through his text. If you have, they are INCREDIBLY
helpful. It's the first place I look when I'm unsure of a parsing.

As for your situation, parsing verbs IS HARD. I think almost anyone
learning Greek can attest that that's the part the seems to be the hardest
to stick in the brain. But it's also one of the most important things you
can learn, exegetically speaking, so keep plugging at it! Struggle isn't
always bad, thanks to the Lord Who works through our stuggles to produce
fruit in us. I'm struggling at times too...particularly witht he
participles. I say, if you can at least recognize that it's a participle,
then you're in good shape! It's only a matter of looking for clues after
that (personally, I think I've sinned one too many sinful thoughts when I
came across too many MI-verbs! :) ) The best thing to do is look for
these little clues, the characteristics that are partiucular for a certain
tense (e.g. reduplication for the perfect, insertion of theta in aorist
passive and sigma in aorist active, etc.) Once you get them in your head,
you'd be surprised how consistent particples are! If that doesn't work,
just be glad your not trying to parse in Hebrew (just had a midterm this
morning!)...you wanna talk about hard parsing -- sometimes there's only one
letter left from the verb root! After Hebrew, I MISS GREEK! :P

Let me know if I can help you out, and let's struggle on it together, K? :)

Somi.

P.S. Oh! There's a parsing sheet out there (one sheet laminated). I think
it's called the Greek cheat sheet (that might be the name my friends and I
have given it...). I'll get the name of it next time I'm at school. I
looked it over and it was well orgnaized and very informative. I wanted to
buy it...but no money (the life of a typical student!!).

\|/
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0
For I am convinced that neither death nor life,
neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future,
nor any other powers,
neither height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to seperate us from the love of God
that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.